Blogs

Technology and the internet go hand in hand. So when it was time to plan our 2014 venue for Outilingua, we needed to go somewhere with reliable Internet. While we do our best to prepare for poor connectivity (see http://wikitablet.net ) we still have a basic dependence on the Internet to do our job effectively.

The software that we use for linguistics and Bible translation is constantly being updated. Fonts get new special characters added, software gets new options to export content to the web, features get added, bugs get fixed. For the language technology specialist, it is a difficult job keeping everyone up to date, especially if a poor internet connection makes it difficult to download the 150 Megabyte installation file during working hours when someone is in your office needing help.

I have multiple Google email accounts and because Google still things that an email address is a unique identifier of an individual I have only activated Google+ on one of them.

This one is just for fun. This is how you can cross a border between European countries these days :-). Image shows me crossing from Germany to Switzerland.

MacMillan and others have stopped producing printed copies of their dictionaries, switching to online or electronic versions only. The choice was necessitated by the severe decrease in demand, as high school and college students, once their biggest market, no longer pick up these paper books. Such a rapid pace of change! Just two years ago when my son Kevin went to college, we got him the biggest baddest paper dictionary that we could find.

Maybe because of the way I think, I have trouble working in a flat document to put down my creative ideas. They come in a haphazard fashion, and at the moment I'm not sure where they fit into the global structure I'm trying to create. In the past, most of my newsletters, sermon preparations, teaching plans have all taken place on a nice yellow legal pad. But no one else would be able to interpret the end result.

John Nystrom was interviewed recently on FOX news about the book, Sleeping Coconuts, that he and his wife Bonnie authored. The book is about the effects of the July 17,1998 Tsunami on the Papua New Guinea village they had been working in and how they subsequently changed their Bible translation strategy to work in multiple languages at once.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/1974426927001/missionary-family-brave-tsunami-to-help-community/?playlist_id=162726

I've never been great with video recording. Sure, we had a camcorder to record those precious moments with our children, but I've never done anything with them yet. When I made a video recording to explain our ministry, it was an agonizing process for me, and that was just a talking head. But we realized that video is the best means for communication in the present, and so I figured that I had better give it another chance.

As a Bible translator, I have typically looked at a dozen different translations of the Bible in addition to the Greek or Hebrew when translating into the Fulfulde language. I have always appreciated the fresh perspective that the New Living Translation gave, and especially the naturalness of the English language that is used to convey the truth of Scripture into modern English. As a result, I have been reading from the NLT for my devotions and for our family devotions for many years. But it wasn't good enough for Scripture memory.